User blog:Jazzcookie/Revival - Community feedback and ideas
Hello all, the purpose of this particular blog is to gather opinions and ideas relating to community matters. The revival of the wiki brings an opportunity to add the new features Fandom offers, and I'd like to run these past the community as a whole. If there's anything I've missed, please let me know. Talk Pages vs. Message Walls If you're unfamiliar with message walls, you can see them in action here and read more about them here. My view on this that the newer message walls would be better for us; they are more user-friendly for newer editors, and it's easier to keep track of conversations. Consensus so far/action being taken *There have been no objections to switching to message walls; if this continues to be the case on Monday we'll change it then. Article talk pages vs. Article comments Article comments can be seen in action here and more can be read about them on this page. This feature adds the ability to comment articles but removes the associated talk pages. From my experience, article comments tend to attract a lot of spam, whilst talk pages are generally more likely to be used for wiki matters. I dislike article comments, but as they can be disabled at whim, I'm not strictly opposed to activating them. Consensus so far/action being taken *This topic will remain open for longer. Fandom Chat vs. Discord vs. No live chat feature An example of fandom chat can be found here and the page yapping about it is here. Honestly, I'm sorta apathetic about live chat. It's not something I currently use, but I recognise that it could bring huge benefits for us in terms of community. Most wikis which choose to enable live chat do so via Discord. Consensus so far/action being taken *This topic will remain open for longer. *Things we need to think about: if we go with Discord, do we work with an established group or do we set up our own? If it's the latter then who will mod it? *If we implement a live chat feature, whether it's discord or fandom, I think we should have a policy that all wiki-related matters should only be discussed on the wiki. It's better for record-keeping and will make it easier for all users to see updates. *Like discussions, there tends to be a disconnect between LC users and wiki editors; how can we lessen this? Discussions These are Fandom's new forum type thing, an example can be found here with documentation here. Traditionally, there has been a big gap between wiki contributors and discussion contributors- something which Fandom is aware of and is working on addressing, but it'd help to brainstorm how we could limit this gap further if we implement this. One small thing could be to add something like this to the sidebar and main page. Consensus so far/action being taken *No strict opposition but this topic will remain open for discussion for a bit longer. Achievements vs. Community awards vs. Both vs. No award system Examples of fandom achievements can be found here with the explanations here. It enables a point scoring system, with editors earning badges for various edits. These do not account for the quality of edits made and are open to abuse, but encourage editors- particularly newer ones- to continue editing. I think a good way of working with these is to have both the fandom system and a community-generated system like this. We could have userboxes for certain milestones and other achievements which the computer-generated system would ignore. Consensus so far/action being taken *General agreement for both; unless anyone objects we'll be requesting Achievement activation from staff on Monday. *A community-generated system will be implemented in the future- all ideas for this are very welcome! Which achievements should we celebrate? Got any good names for the rewards? Please let us know! Category:Blog posts